NPR Staff

"The beauty was in the rawness," says the violinist, who based her latest album around field recordings from the American South.

The French opera singer takes on the repertoire of a famous 18th-century castrato. Jaroussky cuts a masculine figure on the cover of his new album, but you might do a double take upon hearing it.

The star violinist's new multi-year project goes to the heart of a difficult and fascinating era: the 1930s, when dazzle and sorrow commingled musically.

Danilo Pérez got his start playing piano with Dizzy Gillespie. The celebrated composer's latest project is an ambitious one: 500 years of trade, exploration and colonization represented in music.

When the sisters of Benedictines of Mary, Queen of the Apostles are not hard at work on their monastery grounds, they're topping the charts with albums of sacred music. "We're not fabricating anything," Mother Cecilia says. "This is just music we're pulling from our everyday life."

On Feb. 12, 1964 a high-stakes gig and some backstage tension led to a singular performance caught on tape.

Compared to his work on Zero Dark Thirty and the Harry Potter films, Alexandre Desplat's Oscar-nominated score is strikingly spare — yet the composer says it was one of the hardest he's ever written.

The Houston Grand Opera is presenting the American premiere of The Passenger, an opera written nearly 50 years ago about an Auschwitz survivor who meets a former Nazi officer on a cruise ship. The opera premiered to acclaim in Europe in 2010 — but its Polish-born composer never heard it performed.

Sixty years ago, a jazz pianist found himself in much the same bittersweet position as a rapper did on Sunday night. Surely proud of their hard work, they also sensed that their privilege as white musicians had something to do with their new success.

From a powerful short story in the New Yorker to a major motion picture, Annie Proulx's Brokeback Mountain now takes the stage in Madrid as a new opera, composed by Pulitzer winner Charles Wuorinen.